Tag Archives: David Fincher

Enrique Buchichio is a critic-turned-filmmaker and the director of La Escuela de Cine del Uruguay. His first feature, the gay coming-of-age drama Leo’s Room, is available to stream via Fandor and his second, Operation Zanahoria, recently had its North American premiere at the Chicago Latino Film Festival. I spoke with Buchichio at length about his terrific new film, a gripping procedural about political secrets and journalistic ethics in the vein of All the President’s Men. A fraction of that interview has been posted at Time Out Chicago, but I’m printing the unexpurgated version here.

MGS: It seems like every year there are more Uruguayan films playing in international film festivals. Is that a result of increased production in your country or are the films just being more widely distributed now?

EB: A little of both, I think. I think that the national visibility of Uruguayan cinema began in 2001, 2004 with the production of CTRL-Z films, which were the films of Juan-Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stall: 25 Watts, Whisky. At that time there began to be more interest in Uruguayan cinema. I don’t know why but, being a very small country, Uruguay produces eight, 10 films each year. But many of those films get attention from film festivals around the world. It’s a rare phenomenon, I think. I don’t know why. But at the same time it’s true that in the last five, six years, the production has stabilized. I think as a result of national funds for film production and because of the existence of a new generation of Uruguayan filmmakers who are making films in a more systematic . . . There’s no “film industry” in Uruguay yet but there is a group of people who make films.

MGS: And they’re coming out of the film schools?

EB: Basically, yeah. And some of them are people who studied cinema overseas before the existence of Uruguayan film schools and then came back home to make films.

MGS: One thing that’s impressed me is how diverse the films are. I saw an animated film . . .

EB:Anina.

MGS: Yeah! It was very charming and different from the animated films we’re used to seeing in the U.S.

EB: Very good, yeah. This was made by my schoolmates – the same generation.

MGS: No kidding. That played here at the Chicago Latino Film Fest last year.

EB: That’s wonderful, yeah. And now there are a wider diversity of films: horror films like Silent House (La casa muda). . . the director of Silent House (Gustavo Hernandez), which had its American remake, is releasing his second film this year. Local God, it’s called. So there’s more diversity in the films.

MGS: Your first film, Leo’s Room, is a very affecting story about one person’s coming to terms with his sexual identity but Zanahoria is very different, it’s more about society. Was it a conscious decision to make something more ambitious in terms of scope?

EB: Not really. The story just came out. I was, actually before the shooting of Leo’s Room, I read the story. It was a chronicle about the relationship between two Uruguayan journalists with an anonymous informant from the armed forces. And something just made a click with me about the good material for a movie and, at the same time, the opportunity to approach some of the open wounds from the military dictatorship in Uruguay, which is a very polemic issue in Uruguay. It’s a very dividing issue in Uruguayan society between the people who believe that there are still things to reveal and to process, and another half of the country who believe that it’s a closed chapter and we have to move on, don’t look back, etc.

MGS: Is it controversial to depict that in a film?

EB: Kind of. For me, the interesting thing about the story, which I adapted (because it’s a real story), is that it’s actually the state of things today in Uruguay – not only 10 years ago when the story took place, but today. Today, it’s the same thing: 10 years after, we are still trying to come to terms with the recent past, with the brutal years and trying to understand what it meant to Uruguayan identity, what some Uruguayan people did to each other because of their ideological beliefs. It was a brutal regime, maybe not so brutal as in Argentina – where it had a bigger scale in terms of the “disappeared,” the political prisoners – but for a small country, it made a huge impact on society.

MGS: That came through in the film very strongly, especially the scenes where the journalists were talking to the families of the disappeared. It’s funny; the dictatorship ended in the 1980s . . .

EB: Yeah, in 1985.

MGS: That seems so long ago to me, as an American, but I guess for those who lived through that era in Uruguay, the wounds are still fresh.

EB: Absolutely.

MGS: And one thing I thought while watching it is that maybe it was more suspenseful to someone like me, as an outsider, who didn’t know the history. I thought it was gripping because I had no clue what was going to happen. I was guessing until the end: I thought the information Walter was giving the journalists was going to affect the election in 2004. I was wondering if maybe people in Uruguay had a different reaction.

EB: Kind of. Many people knew that nothing really happened about the clearance of knowing who did what to whom but some people didn’t know about it. And some people actually don’t know today what happened those years in Uruguay.

MGS: Because they’re too young?

EB: Yes, there are younger generations who didn’t live through the dictatorship years and some people because they didn’t want to know. They preferred to ignore it. Or, because of ideological differences, some people are convinced that that was necessary – that the brutality and the prosecution of leftist militants was actually a good idea. To those people, it’s very difficult to make them understand that that was traumatic for Uruguayan society. So, many people knew what was going to happen in the movie and other people didn’t know how the movie was going to end. They were very, very trapped by the suspense.

MGS: And so the character of Walter was based on a real . . . I guess you could say he was a con artist, right?

EB: Absolutely. The real Walter, whose name is not Walter, is a former military who was expelled from the armed forces and he made a career as a con artist trying to sell information not only to the disappeared’s families but also journalists. Jorge and Alfredo were not the only ones. They were the only ones who published a story about it but there were other journalists who were victims of this guy. But they didn’t tell anyone because they believed that there was no story in that story. And, at the same time, it was like recognizing that you were deceived.

MGS: It’s a little embarrassing?

EB: Yeah, for a journalist, it’s embarrassing. But that’s why the movie made sense to me: it was very important to make the story public to a bigger audience.

MGS: Where did you first read the story, in a magazine?

EB: In the newspaper. When I was writing the screenplay for my first movie, a friend of mine recommended to me the reading of this article. I read it and I thought, “This is film material. This is the material for a film.”

MGS: For a thriller?

EB: For a thriller, absolutely. And then I put it away for a couple of months and then I read it again and I start to really think about the possibility of making an adaptation in film form.

MGS: Did you interview any of the people who were involved?

EB: Yeah. Afredo and Jorge, the journalists, they were my main source of information apart from the article, of course. They told me many things, many small things, that they didn’t publish but things that made for me a richer story: tiny details about the relationship with this guy, how he acted, how he talked, how he smoked. And then I interviewed other journalists who were victims of Walter. And then I also talked with some families of the disappeared. They were actually victims of Walter too. At that moment I realized that at some point in the story they, as families of the disappeared, should be in the movie because I think that it was important for the audience in Uruguay who didn’t know or didn’t want to know about this tragic episode. At the end of the day it is a human story. It is not only of political interest, it is not only a thing about journalists, it’s actually a human story of human importance.

MGS: Absolutely. It’s very emotional. The scenes with the families are heartbreaking. And there’s a feeling of paranoia that’s very palpable that infuses almost every scene. It’s similar to other procedurals like, obviously, All the President’s Men but also David Fincher’s Zodiac. Did you see that?

EB: Absolutely.

MGS: That’s one of my favorite Hollywood films of this century.

EB: Yeah, it’s wonderful. Yeah, it’s also a very kind of slow-paced thriller. Actually, many people didn’t like Zodiac because of that, because, I mean, there was no action.

MGS: The murders all occur in the first 26 minutes and the film goes on for another two hours and 20 minutes!

EB: Yeah. And at the end of the movie the guy didn’t get caught. You actually didn’t know what really happened. That is very frustrating for many people. With Zanahoria happened something like that – in a different way, of course. Many people thought, “What’s the point to make a film about the guy that didn’t get caught?” I mean, for me it’s very important and it’s very . . . it’s the same thing as the real story. It was very frustrating for the journalists to never get their hands on the information that he promised. So it’s understandable that the audience also could feel kind of frustrated about that.

MGS: I think it’s good, especially when you’re dealing with something political. If it’s open-ended like that, I think you’re more likely to think about it after you leave the theater.

EB: Yeah.

MGS: Fassbinder said something I always liked: “Movies should have an unhappy ending so that life can have a happy ending.”

EB: Yeah.

MGS: When everything is tied up at the end, you often just forget about it; it’s like, the characters solved the problem in the movie so we don’t need to solve the problem in reality. In your film, the audience leaves the theater with a feeling of frustration and maybe rage.

EB: Absolutely. And the feeling that the story goes on. The story is not closed. There’s many things that we still don’t know about what happened. It’s the same today, as I told you before, not only in 2004 but in 2015. 30 years after the end of the regime. We don’t know everything that happened and that’s very frustrating.

MGS: I think your approach is the right one for this kind of material. I think that’s the way cinema should be.

EB: Thank you.

You can check out the trailer for Operation Zanahoria (without English subtitles) via YouTube below:

When I interviewed Larry Knapp last Octoberabout the newly released book of David Fincher interviews he edited, the transcript I posted was only a small fraction of our talk. In editing the interview, I decided to focus mostly on the parts of our conversation that explicitly dealt with his book and Fincher’s career. Larry and I both lamented that our favorite parts of the discussion had ended up on the “cutting room floor” — especially digressions involving Quentin Tarantino, the decadent side of the auteur theory, cinematic postmodernism and how Fincher is and is not like Alfred Hitchcock. (This last aspect looks particularly interesting in light of the recent announcement that Fincher will remake Strangers on a Train.) So here, ladies and gentlemen, are the provocative “outtakes” of our interview:

MGS: I think of Zodiac as a corrective to Se7en in a way — even though I don’t think David Fincher necessarily thinks of Se7en as anything that needs to be corrected. But it functions that way in the sense that in the Nineties there was this whole idea that the serial killer — it was really The Silence of the Lambs that introduced this idea — that the serial killer is an almost God-like figure. You know, Hannibal Lecter almost had super-powers in a way and even though he was the “villain,” viewers were supposed to be in awe of those powers . . .

LK: But that’s because American culture has become monstrous and so we naturally begin to identify with these omnipotent, gothic figures who are like a comic inversion of Nietzche or something.

MGS: And Natural Born Killers is the apotheosis of that.

LK: Absolutely. They’re kind of just nakedly revealing what’s at the heart of the American experience, which is something very pathological and hostile and anti-social and destructive. And we’re carrying it around with us but we’re not acknowledging it. And that’s why Woody Harrelson feels the need to give that lecture to Robert Downey Jr., you know? “How many times do I have to say this before you get it?”

MGS: And Se7en is in the tradition of that in a way because Kevin Spacey is . . .

LK: Oh, no, no, no. You know what Kevin Spacey is? He’s the ultimate slacker. It’s the slacker as gothic monster. What does he do all day? He’s writing in his journal, he’s hanging’ out. That’s a slacker, man. It’s a Grand Guignol Clerks.

MGS: True, true, but we’re also supposed to think he’s a genius and he’s supposed to inspire awe, and something about that strikes me as dubious. I was glad to see Zodiac avoid all of that by not dealing with that type of character. Zodiac is mostly about decent, ordinary, hard-working people — especially the cops played by Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards.

LK: Yeah, but you know what? I really think that Zodiac is about the fact that it’s not serial killers that fascinate people as much as what it does to the social fabric, and how people relate to each other — so it’s the after-effect. That’s why again it’s only for the first 20 minutes (that you see the murders) because it’s really about how people process it and make sense of it — or fail to make sense of it. That matters more than the actual person or entity who’s responsible for it. And again that’s why you don’t catch him and charge him and imprison him and execute him. The damage is already done.

MGS: But, on the other hand, Fincher could’ve made a whole film out of that first 26 minutes. And that’s what he did with Se7en in a way. Zodiac is more interesting to me because it’s about what happened afterwards, for years afterwards.

LK: It’s also about rotary telephones and early fax machines . . .

MGS: Exactly! It’s a film about information, you know? It’s made from a 21st century perspective, the Information Age, and it’s about the characters’ inability to share information in the Seventies.

MGS: Even though he’s obviously very articulate and witty and smart . . .

LK: I’m sure he can be very difficult to be around and very sure of himself — probably as egotistical as anyone else — but he doesn’t channel that into that need to be hip, that need to be the center of attention, that is one of Quentin Tarantino’s great failings. I once listened to an interview Tarantino gave on Sirius for Django Unchained, which is a really frustrating movie . . .

MGS: Agreed.

LK: And Jamie Foxx, he has a series, “Foxhole” or whatever, and he interviewed Quentin Tarantino. So it was already as obsequious as you can get. Because he’s like, “You’re the greatest filmmaker of your generation,” you know? “I gotta make you look good so I look good.” Tarantino, I mean, I’ve never heard someone so freaking high on the most mundane details of a film. Everything according to him was brilliantly executed. Like everything about Django Unchained was peerless. The sheer myopic self-regard, it was so overbearing I turned it off. I was like, “You are an asshole in a way that I cannot enjoy.” You know?

MGS: Oh yeah, his performance in Django Unchained was, for me, the straw that broke the camel’s back. That bad Australian accent!

LK: And you being from North Carolina, which is more southern than where I’m from, in Virginia — although, again, I’m from the Commonwealth of Virginia and that’s where Robert E. Lee came from, you know, and all of the people that matter; the Civil War began and ended in Virginia, thank-you-very-much. But when you watch what Tarantino did to southern culture and folklore, it’s just disgusting. He has no clue what he’s doing. And he’s from Tennessee too. I mean, he was born there. He should know better.

MGS: Well, yeah, but it’s really a movie about movies.

LK: Yeah, but Mandingo or The Skin Game is not where you go to get a sense of how things operated! You know what? It’s no different from Inglourious Basterds.

MGS: Right, which is also a movie about movies.

LK: Which didn’t upset me as much because I’m not Jewish. I know a lot of Jewish people who were like, “What the hell is this?” But then I knew some other Jewish people who were like, “You know what? I like these macho Jews.” Because Jews wouldn’t present themselves as thugs.

MGS: Well, as Tarantino himself said, it’s a spaghetti western that uses World War II iconography. It’s meant to be a cartoon and I enjoyed it on that level. But I agree, Django is more offensive.

LK: But you can’t imagine Fincher making something like that.

MGS: No, and I think Fincher is more like a craftsman. For him, it’s all about the work. And he’s incredibly precise as a technician. For him, the mise-en-scene is everything. And whatever sense you get of his personality comes from the formal perfection you see in his work. So, in a way, when you talk about him, all there is to talk about is the work itself.

LK: But shouldn’t that be the foundation of any auteur?

MGS: Absolutely. I mean, I think Tarantino represents the “auteur theory” taken to a kind of decadent extreme. The decadence of somebody saying, “Okay, I want to be an auteur. Now what can I do to be perceived that way?” People become directors today for the same reason people have always wanted to become actors, because they want to be famous. There’s a great story: before he made Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino took some Sundance workshop to learn how to direct a movie — this was after he had written the script but before he began pre-production. And he met Terry Gilliam at this workshop and he said to Gilliam, “Every time I see one of your movies, I get that ‘Terry Gilliam feeling.’ How do you do that?”

LK: Wow.

MGS: And that tells you everything you need to know about Tarantino: in his very first film, he was already thinking about, “What can I do to create Quentin Tarantino trademarks?” And that’s why in his first three films you see all of these really gratuitous trademarks (car-trunk p.o.v. shots, “Big Kahuna” burgers, etc.).

LK: But they work really well.

MGS: They do. That’s his best work. But the desire to be regarded as a famous director is written all over those films in a way that it’s not in, say, Alien 3, Se7en and The Game.

LK: But this is also the two views of Gen-X. Because Gen-X does have this sort of Tarantino-ish quality to it, which is a total immersion in pop culture without any real profound engagement with it at the same time. It’s more superficial.

MGS: Right. Tarantino and Rodriguez, especially, are the ones who say, “Okay, I’m gonna make a film and it’s gonna be a mash-up of everything I love from when I was a kid. All of the grindhouse films of my youth — I’m gonna make a mix-tape where I just throw it all together.”

LK: A mix-tape is a perfect analogy for that. Kevin Smith does the same thing too.

MGS: And that can be clever and enjoyable but it’s also kind of a dead end after you’ve seen it so many times.

LK: Well, that’s the whole problem with postmodernism. When it’s just a surface reflection of another surface reflection of something else in front of a mirror, eventually, yes, there is a dislocation. There is a decentered-ness that prevents you from being significant or poignant or anything. And I feel like with Fincher, he has Gen-X qualities in terms of quoting some things occasionally. Wasn’t it Brad Pitt who came up with the “Run, Forrest, run” that’s in Fight Club?

MGS: Oh, I don’t know.

LK: For some reason I remember it was Brad Pitt who came up with that. But then Fincher said, “Do it.” So there’s your little postmodern toss — but it’s appropriate. It’s staged properly. You always feel like with Fincher that he knows just as much as Tarantino knows about pop culture. But he is still a narrative filmmaker, a very traditional filmmaker, who feels that he must create not a — as you say — mix-tape with highs and lows and just a lot of scattered business here and there. But rather a very whole and complete, aesthetically rich, narrative film that does not require that you have this Simpsons-like knowledge of pop culture. So it goes back to very traditional Hollywood storytelling values. And that’s why I think he’s going back to that tradition of using novels as source material for a lot of his work.

MGS: Well, you know what’s interesting to me? Zodiac is based on two non-fiction books by Robert Graysmith. I’ve read the first one and it is poorly written. It’s like yellow journalism. I mean, it is not good. And I’ve never read The Accidental Billionaires, the source of The Social Network, but I would be surprised if that were any better, and I thought perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that my two favorite Fincher films were based on non-fiction . . .

LK: But again this goes into that idea that — Eastwood is like this too, by the way. Eastwood never wrote a script. Sometimes the best filmmaker knows, “You know what? I’ve got enough to contend with casting it, building the sets, figuring out the look of it, and how the film comes together.” If you have the right set up and you have the right performers — and Fincher really intuitively understands what he’s doing — you don’t have to be the quote-unquote author of the script at all. Some of the material I’ve read about Gone Girl, I mean he really got inside that book. He inhabited that book. He understood it. But then he understood it for what he could do with film, film form. How he could condense it and reproduce it as a film regardless of its status as a novel. So maybe this is how it works: his aesthetic instincts — you know, his temperament, his eye, his immersion in it — need that outside narrative material to focus. That he doesn’t need to create it, all he needs is something to create from.

MGS: But he needs to feel some kind of connection to it, I agree with you. I didn’t like Gone Girl, the book. It reminded me of what Godard said about Contempt: “It’s a nice vulgar novel for a train journey.” But when I read it I thought, “This could make a great movie.” Because it’s full of interesting sociological insights into men and women in the 21st century, in the internet age . . .

LK: And it’s post-recession . . .

MGS: Yeah, that’s a huge part of it.

LK: Which is a Gen-X thing.

MGS: The whole closed-down mall thing, and the fact that it’s taking place over the 4th of July weekend, it’s clearly meant to be a statement about America. And I hope he’s emphasizing that aspect of it. Because where I had a problem with it was on the level of character. The character psychology I thought was a little unbelievable.

LK: Glib?

MGS: Yeah, especially after the twist is revealed. The first half of it I thought was incredibly suspenseful and then, after the twist, I thought this is getting so far-fetched and so ridiculous that I got annoyed with it — in a way that I don’t think I will with the film. In a 300-page book if I find something implausible, it’s hard-to-swallow but in a two-hour movie, it’s not.

LK: But it may make a huge difference to see it represented and performed as opposed to narrated.

MGS: That’s true.

LK: Ben Affleck’s expressions may be more expressive than even her writing.

MGS: And I think that’s good casting, by the way.

LK: Yeah, it is. I thought he was older. Then I looked it up. He’s only about 40. So he’s only about four or five years away from the character’s age and he can play a little younger.

MGS: Early on, she describes the character of Nick as being like a “rich-kid villain in an 80s movie.” And as soon as I read that I thought, “Man, did he cast Ben Affleck based on that phrase?” Because that phrase sounds like Ben Affleck.

LK: This is really wonderful when you have a director where you can anticipate his instincts and you know that it’s a good project for him. And it’s just fun to anticipate it for a change. “What’s he gonna do?”

MGS: How is he going to approach the diary chapters? How’s he gonna translate that?

LK: Those are flashbacks. And by the way, I think she wants you annoyed with the “literary” Amy for half the book.

MGS: When I say “implausible,” here’s what I mean: Amy was a genius to pull off this perfect crime. But I think she acted really stupid afterwards by allowing herself to talk to those people . . .

LK: Oh, come on, bro. You’re not getting it! This is the whole problem with her — that she executes it and that’s all she has. And once that’s done, that’s why she goes right back to Nick. Because it’s kind of like, “Well, I did it. Now I need to . . . torture him some more.” It seems like her character — from the way it’s described with her encounters with all the people she met throughout her life — she seems to go from one act of pathological betrayal and control to another. So that’s like the only thing that seems to allow her to function. So it almost makes sense that she would suddenly find herself penniless, robbed, because then she has to connive her way out of another situation with the wealthy ex-boyfriend of hers. In a sense, she executes her murder so well that she cannot come up with anything close to that ever again. So it’s the weirdest love story because she realizes, “Well, I’ll just stay with Nick because I’m never going to do this like this again. I’ll just enjoy torturing him.” And meanwhile he’s like, “I just have to keep leading her on until I can . . .” Right? Which is a really evil, wicked Gen-X view of marriage.

MGS: Oh, I fully get that it’s a twisted love story with an ironic “happy ending.” I just don’t like the way the character psychology is tailored to fit the plot. I wish it had been the other way around — that the plot served the characters. I also don’t buy that they could’ve been married for five years and he could have been so oblivious to the fact that she had been not just pathological but psychotic for practically her whole life. But, like I said, I think the problems I have with it are problems that I won’t have when I see it on the screen. The director that Fincher reminds me of the most is Hitchcock and I think Hitchcock’s films are also implausible . . .

LK: I don’t see Hitchcock as much. In terms of the aesthetics and the immersion in it, yeah, but I don’t feel like Fincher’s as interested in manipulation as much. He can manipulate, and he does it quite often but I feel like there’s more of an inquisitive spirit in Fincher — discovering things — that is not in Hitchcock. Hitchcock has a very fixed view of things by the time he’s making those great films in the early Fifties.

MGS: You don’t think Vertigo is an inquisitive film?

LK: I think Vertigo is a confession by Hitchcock that he is one fucked up dude, okay? And he’s being very honest with us. That’s where he reminds me of Tarantino. That’s one of the things I like about Tarantino. Tarantino is not ashamed to confess: “I am a mess.” He’s not married, he doesn’t have any kids. He’s a complete misogynist, he’s got racist issues. And you know what? He does not give a shit.

MGS: He throws it all up there on the screen.

LK: And I actually admire him for it. I think that Death Proof is brilliant with the rape-as-car-crash collision — where body parts are flying all over the place. No man has ever exposed himself like this. Man, I mean, I wouldn’t be willing to let myself be displayed like that. And he plays a grungy, pretty despicable guy in that movie. It’s like, “Wow, good for you. This level of honesty redeems you. This makes you more interesting.”

MGS: He’s honest about his obsessions.

LK: Even Hitchcock wasn’t as honest. I mean Vertigo? And then he makes Marnie?

MGS: Which is more twisted.

LK: Well, kind of equally fucked up. And then he gets to — what is that one in the early Seventies with the necktie killings?

MGS:Frenzy.

LK:Frenzy. Oh my God, Frenzy is like a dirty-old-man movie! This guy never got laid enough or never got the chance to lash out at a woman. Hitchcock was one repressed, frustrated, demented guy and I just don’t get that with Fincher. I get the feeling that Fincher is much more comfortable with himself and that what Fincher is fascinated by is how American culture is not willing to look the abyss in the eye — or not willing to own up to any phobias, fears, or anxieties that define our daily existence. I feel like with Fincher, that’s his task. It’s like, “I’m gonna expose this because I feel like no one is even going near it.” Fight Club for me was such an important film about being a young professional in America — as a white male — and how American culture seemed to have given up on anything other than consumption. And that’s how I felt when I saw the film. As I wrote in the introduction, I saw the film with my wife and she loved the film because Brad Pitt was in it and he had his shirt off, so she was happy. But I’m like, “Oh my God, this is that bottomless rage I had when I had that job working for a software company.” This is it. Office Space gets it right too.

MGS: Oh, totally. (laughs)

LK: They work well together, those films. And that’s not what a Tarantino or a Hitchcock would do. They’re into more personal psycho-pathology, you know? I think that Fincher is more like De Palma. Because Brian De Palma borrowed from Hitchcock and he introduced the idea of the cinematic set-piece quotation but it’s a modernist quotation. Whenever De Palma does it, it’s to make you more aware of film language. I think if you watch a De Palma and don’t get excited by it then you really don’t understand form. Because I don’t think anyone got form as well as De Palma did — even Scorsese. Because Scorsese is like the Raging Bull of form: I don’t think he’s ever fully conscious of what he’s doing.

MGS: Right. De Palma takes a much more intellectual . . .

LK: Cerebral . . .

MGS: . . . approach whereas Scorsese is more instinctive . . .

LK: Right, which is fine too. But with De Palma, I feel like he’s using film to work his way through actual film language and how film operates: voyeurism, continuity, you name it, he messes with it. And then he’s thinking about how to use films to expose parts of American culture and society that are neglected or rejected. And that to me is more like Fincher.

MGS: When I say that Fincher reminds me of Hitchcock, I mean in the sense that Hitchcock took novels that he could connect to in some way — and he didn’t take great literature. Truffaut asked him if he would ever adapt Crime and Punishment and he said he wouldn’t because it’s a masterpiece and you can’t improve up on someone else’s masterpiece . . .

LK: Can I quibble with you here?

MGS: Yeah, go right ahead (laughs).

LK: I think that Hitchcock did not film Crime and Punishment because deep down he felt inferior to it.

MGS: Oh! (laughs)

LK: It makes him feel grandiose to take schlock — detective novels and thrillers — and then redeem them. Because that’s safer than taking Crime and Punishment and turning it into a movie because then there’ll be more scrutiny. Where like a Von Sternberg made Crime and Punishment — Von Sternberg was, I don’t think, very insecure — as far as we know about that guy. (laughs) I mean, he was like a Fincher with the studios. He was like, “Fuck you. I’m gonna film this with Marlene Dietrich using all these curtains and gauze and camels . . . and screw you.”

MGS: (laughs) But regardless of the intention, Hitchcock took potboilers and he turned them into masterpieces.

LK: He did but he’s very insincere about these things when he talks about them . . .

MGS:Psycho is not a good book! I’ve read it. It’s terrible.

LK: That’s fine . . .

MGS: The film is great. I’ve never read the book Vertigo is based on but I’m sure it’s the same thing. With Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I’ve never read it, I’m sure it’s not good.

LK: It’s okay.

MGS: Right, but I don’t think he transcended the source material.

LK: It made no sense, when they (already) made a Swedish version, to set it in Sweden. I mean, right away, there are, as you say, implausibilities that make it just pointless. It’s like “You shot it in Sweden but nobody’s Swedish!” Except for . . . what’s his name?

MGS: Stellan Skarsgard.

LK: Yeah, he is, but he’s speaking English. There’s a Swedish one! I watched it — with the subtitles! It’s set there. I don’t understand why you’re reenacting it. And Noomi Rapace is so much more compelling than Mara. As much as I like Rooney Mara and her approach, there are so many other things to do. This doesn’t make since to redo this quickly.

MGS: It doesn’t need to exist.

LK: No, and that was the problem. Particularly as you get near the end. I’m like, “Oh, here we go. I know what’s gonna happen.” And I even mention in the introduction of David Fincher: Interviews you could argue that Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is about the global 1% preying on the rest of us but the film isn’t as engaged as all the other films he’s made.

MGS: Right, he’s just fulfilling an assignment. On the level of mise-en-scene, it’s pleasurable to watch because he’s never going to half-ass anything. But my hope for Gone Girl is that he’ll find a way to connect with it that will reveal some of these disturbing truths about American life in the 21st century.

LK: Fair enough. Now let me ask you something: don’t you find it peculiar how much press it’s getting?

MGS: I do, yeah.

LK: What is going on? Is now the time when some people are awakening to Fincher’s status? Because I write in the introduction I already consider him the preeminent Gen-X filmmaker period. I have no problem saying that. I put him together with Tarantino. You know who Tarantino is? That dude you just love to hang out with but at the same time it’s like, “God, you need to get a life. You are a funny motherfucker but, damn, your life is a mess!”

MGS: Right. You have a love/hate relationship with his films.

LK: Right. I cannot dismiss him but at the same time it’s like, “Damn, couldn’t you do something other than this? You have talent! What the fuck is this? Why don’t you make a movie about a marriage? Oh, that’s right, you’re not married. I don’t think you understand what women even are.” But Fincher . . . I feel like maybe people are finally like, “Oh, we never really considered his work before.” I didn’t expect this much attention and this much of a groundswell of anticipation. I don’t remember this for any other Fincher film. You know, it’s odd in that way. But it feels almost old-fashioned, the amount of auteurist attention Fincher is getting. We haven’t seen this in a while. It’s refreshing. It’s like they’re privileging Fincher as an artist, as a filmmaker of merit, who deserves this much coverage and warrants this much anticipation and interest. It’s odd how these things play out, and now I’m perplexed and curious why now this is Fincher’s time, instead of the late 1990s.

MGS: Right. Well, hopefully, the film will live up to our expectations. (laughs)

Here is the entire list of my 100 favorite movies of the past five years. I have provided not only images but also capsule reviews for the top 25, some of which I wrote exclusively for this post. Don’t forget to let me know how many you’ve seen for a chance to win dinner and a movie on me and/or a copy of my book Flickering Empire.

UPDATE: The winners are Jake Cole, Daniel Nava and Dan Kieckhefer, all of whom have been notified via e-mail. Thanks for playing, everybody. We’ll do it again in five more years!

Legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki brought down the curtain on his estimable career when he announced that The Wind Rises, a biopic of aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi and his first film aimed squarely at an adult audience, would also be his last. As seen by Miyazaki, Jiro’s life plays out against the moving backdrop of 20th century Japanese history, including such key events as the 1923 Kanto earthquake, the tuberculosis epidemic (represented by Jiro’s doomed romance with his tubercular wife Nahoko) and, of course, World War II. This latter aspect engendered controversy when some among the left in Japan condemned Miyazaki’s refusal to condemn Jiro for designing fighter planes during the war (though the fact that the film simultaneously alienated Japanese conservatives for being “anti-Japanese” is surely an indication that he was doing something right). Miyazaki instead chooses to portray Jiro as an apolitical dreamer caught in the jaws of history; the way the character’s fantasy life is placed on the same plane as reality — as evidenced by his repeated encounters with his hero, a famous Italian engineer — results in something mature, beautiful and profound, and adds up to a kind of self-portrait on the part of the director. Also, if you want to know why good old-fashioned hand-drawn animation feels more personal than its digital counterpart, look no further than here.

24. This Is Not a Film (Panahi/Mirtahmasb, Iran, 2011) – 9.5

Chris Marker concludes his extraordinary 1993 documentary The Last Bolshevik by noting that, in the silent era, Russian director Alexander Medvedkin cried the first time he spliced two shots together and saw the result run through a motion picture projector. Marker then poignantly adds “Nowadays television floods the whole world with senseless images and nobody cries.” The antiquated notion of a movie inspiring someone to cry — not just over its content but due to the miracle of its construction — is unexpectedly resurrected in Jafar Panahi’s lo-fi-by-necessity This Is Not a Film. There was nothing in any film to first play Chicago in 2012 more moving or more profound than the scene where Panahi, under house arrest, concludes a lengthy description of his proposed next movie, one that he will probably never be able to make, by asking, “If we could tell a film, then why make a film?” There are tears of frustration in his eyes when he asks this question. Against all odds, This Is Not a Film ends up triumphantly providing the answer by refusing to exist as something that “can be told.” See it and weep for yourself. Full review here.

23. Timbuktu (Sissako, Mauritania, 2014) – 9.5

Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako follows up Bamako, his great 2006 indictment of the World Bank and western capitalism, with an equally damning indictment of third-world religious extremism. This lightning-in-a-bottle masterpiece, based on real events that occurred in 2012 but which seem even more prescient following the rise of ISIS, concerns the occupation of the Malian city of Timbuktu by militant Islamist rebels. Sissako’s eye-opening film intertwines several narratives, all of which dramatize the clash between foreign “jihadists” and the moderate Muslim natives of Mali, most prominent among them the story of a cattle farmer (Ibrahim Ahmed) whose wife is coveted by the region’s new extremist ruler. Like last year’s A Touch of Sin, this vital movie offers a keyhole through which viewers can peer into an authentic dramatization of pressing global issues that goes way beyond mere news headlines. What really elevates Timbuktu to the status of essential viewing, however, is the way Sissako brings to his story the point of view of poetry — most evident in a stunningly composed scene of conflict between the cattle farmer and a fisherman, and an exquisitely lovely montage sequence involving a soccer match played without a ball. More here.

22. The Ghost Writer (Polanski, UK/Germany, 2010) – 9.5

With this, his 19th feature film, Roman Polanski earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first director to supervise post-production of a major motion picture from jail. Unfortunately, the brouhaha surrounding l’affaire Polanski overshadowed this superb return to form, a meticulously crafted political thriller. Comparisons between The Ghost Writer and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island are instructive, as both are influenced by Alfred Hitchcock but in radically different ways; Scorsese is the modernist, Polanski the classicist. In Scorsese’s film, every aspect of the movie is aggressively stylized as a way for the director to comment on the subject matter (expressive camera movements, bold colors, intentionally fake-looking digital backdrops, crazy editing rhythms). In Polanski’s film, the visual components are just as aesthetically developed but are less self-conscious and more pressed to the service of, not really the story per se, but more what I would call Polanski’s themes; this is most obvious in Polanski’s rigorous color scheme (in particular the suppression of red) and the set design of Pierce Brosnan’s beach-front home, which is best described as a modern-art nightmare. Both movies finally aren’t about “story” at all; Shutter Island centers on the question of whether violence is inherent in human nature. The Ghost Writer is a query into the dark heart of our new global society and how the major players on that stage use, betray, victimize and discard one another.

21. The Turin Horse (Tarr/Hranitzky, Hungary, 2011) – 9.5

I’m no expert on Hungarian director Bela Tarr, who announced this would be his final film, but from the handful of his movies I’ve seen this strikes me as one of the best and most essential. The Turin Horse begins with a narrator recounting the anecdote about Nietzsche going mad shortly after witnessing a horse being flogged in Italy. The film is a fictionalized version of what happened to the horse and its owner in the six days following their encounter with the philosopher, which reminds us that people who constitute even the smallest footnotes in history have their own stories and their own points-of-view. This is simultaneously more straightforward and more abstract than Tarr’s masterpiece Satantango; unlike the earlier film, it focuses relentlessly on two characters (a cabman and his daughter) instead of an ensemble cast and proceeds in linear fashion instead of a chronology that doubles back on itself. What remains the same is the use of epic long takes, in which entire scenes unfold with elaborate camera movements and little to no editing. The images themselves — decaying walls, wrinkled faces, and leaves and dirt constantly swirling in the air — take on the thick, tactile textures of a charcoal drawing. Aiding them is a wonderfully hypnotic musical score, where strings and an organ play a repetitive, circular motif. The result is a mesmerizing and unforgettable experience. More here.

20. Under the Skin (Glazer, UK, 2013) – 9.6

I’ve been surprised by the number of people I’ve spoken to who were turned off by Jonathan Glazer’s mind-blowing horror/sci-fi/art film, starring Scarlett Johansson in her finest performance to date, seemingly because it deviates too much from what they expect from a horror, sci-fi, art or Scarlett Johansson film. Johansson daringly inhabits the role of an alien succubus who cruises contemporary Glasgow in a van at night — picking up, seducing and killing young men (most of whom are portrayed by non-actors initially filmed against their knowledge via hidden digital cameras). While having the alien function as a kind of mirror that reflects the basest instincts of men, Glazer’s movie may feel like an unusually cruel statement about humanity but this is more than counterbalanced by the director’s highly distinctive approach to constructing sound and image, which is so original that I felt exhilarated for days after first seeing it. I am especially fond of the seduction sequences, which imaginatively depict the alien’s victims willingly sinking into an inky black void, and Mica Levi’s otherworldly string-based score. Full review here.

19. Something in the Air (Assayas, France, 2012) – 9.6

Olivier Assayas’s autobiographical quasi-sequel to his autobiographical Cold Water is one of the most detailed and convincing portraits of the late Sixties/early Seventies counterculture I’ve ever seen in a movie (from France or anywhere else). It is a vividly imagined evocation of the “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll” era that impressively manages to avoid the cliched treatment you might expect of its subject. From France to Italy to England, Assayas’ mise-en-scene is lovingly detailed throughout, as if each shot were meticulously recreated from one of the director’s highly personal memories, but it’s the faces of the actors that ultimately give the film its throat-catching power: these remarkable young people register on screen with the delicacy, beauty and physical immediacy of the “models” of late Bresson. One can only hope that Assayas will keep this adventures-of-Gilles series going and turn it into an Antoine Doinel-like cycle of his own. More here.

18. Tabu (Gomes, Portugal, 2012) – 9.6

This lyrical and entrancing black-and-white movie, which boasts an intriguing two-part structure, announced the arrival of a major talent in the person of 39-year-old Portuguese writer/director Miguel Gomes (who had worked as a film critic and made just two features previously). The first half, entitled “Paradise Lost,” concerns the death of Aurora (Laura Soveral), an old woman and compulsive gambler suffering from dementia in contemporary Lisbon. The second half, entitled “Paradise,” flashes back to Aurora’s youth when she was the beautiful wife of a colonialist-farmer, living on “Mount Tabu” in Africa, and having an affair with Ventura, another Portuguese ex-patriate and the drummer in a rock-and-roll band. I loved everything about this movie: its dreaminess, its eroticism, and its extended poetic reflections on time and memory. And this is not to mention that it also pays homage to F.W. Murnau’s classic 1931 film of the same title and features a bitching Portuguese-language cover of The Ronnettes’ “Be My Baby.” Oh yeah! Full review here.

17. Shutter Island (Scorsese, USA, 2010) – 9.6

The closest Martin Scorsese has come to making a straight-up horror film is also the best thing he’s done since Goodfellas in 1990. Forget all the talk about the narrative twists and turns, which aren’t any more implausible or predictable than what you will find in Alfred Hitchcock’s best movies. Shutter Island is crucial cinema because of the raw and ferocious emotions at its core, in particular the palpable guilt, fear and paranoia of Leonardo DiCaprio’s FBI man Teddy Daniels. These emotions all coalesce in the film’s ingenious finale, which critic Glenn Kenny has aptly compared to Vertigo and rightly referred to as a “perfect note of empathetic despair.” Once the mystery plot has given up its surface secrets, Shutter Island still repays multiple viewings as a brilliant character study. And the baroque visuals, which clearly show the influence of Scorsese’s idol Michael Powell, are never less than a treat.

16. In the Shadows (Arslan, Germany, 2010) – 9.7

Tragically unknown in the U.S., German director Thomas Arslan’s crime thriller recalls the heyday of Jean-Pierre Melville in its portrait of a taciturn thief known only as “Trojan” (Misel Maticevic), a career criminal who emerges from prison only to immediately embark on a new heist job. Meanwhile, both the cops and a former gangster-nemesis plot to bring about his downfall. Arslan’s mastery of the heist picture here is every bit as impressive as his mastery of the Eric Rohmer-style intellectual rom-com in his superb earlier film A Fine Day (2001). Every element of this minimalist movie fits together with the precision of a Swiss watch and yet, after In the Shadows has marched inexorably to its finale, the conclusion still manages to surprise in its supremely cool irony. Arslan could hold up his original screenplay next to anything Quentin Tarantino’s ever written and say, “Suck my dick.” It’s that good.

15. Inherent Vice (Anderson, USA, 2014) – 9.7

When I first saw Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson’s shaggy-dog stoner-detective comedy based on Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel of the same title, I felt that the director was surprisingly mismatched to the source material. A second viewing, however, has convinced me of just the opposite: the strengths of novelist and filmmaker perfectly compliment one another to create the most ideal Pynchon adaptation anyone could have asked for. Anderson, after all, has a tendency to focus on character psychology at the expense of plot (his recent films have increasingly alienated general audiences because of their narrative gaps and ambiguities) while Pynchon, by contrast, privileges plot over character — his sense of characterization has always skewed towards the cartoonish and iconographic in order for him to better hurtle his characters down insanely elaborate narrative rabbit holes (each of his novels offers a seemingly never-ending series of conspiracy-theory plots). What’s remarkable about Inherent Vice is the way the Anderson has been able to remain extremely faithful to the book while also creating something that feels as deeply personal as his other work. He achieves this by making subtle but crucial changes to the novel: notably by turning the love story between Joaquin Phoenix’s P.I. Larry “Doc” Sportello and Katherine Waterston’s hippie beach-bum Shasta Fay Hepworth into the emotional center of the story, and by making far more explicit the notion that conservative cop Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) is Sportello’s doppelganger; the poignant final scene between the two men perfectly encapsulates Pynchon’s counterculture/”straight world” dichotomy while also recalling the all-male love/hate story climaxes of There Will Be Blood and The Master.

14. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan, Turkey, 2011) – 9.7

Is there a contemporary director with a keener compositional eye than Nuri Bilge Ceylan? This haunting drama, a journey to the end of a long Turkish night, concerns the efforts of police officers, a prosecutor, and a doctor to lead a confessed murderer to the rural site where he allegedly buried his victim. The movie’s mesmerizing first two thirds feature gorgeous landscape photography that captures the Turkish countryside in stunningly composed long shots illuminated primarily by the yellow headlights of the police convoy. But Ceylan merely uses the “police procedural” as a pretext to investigate what might be termed the soul of his country. The final third, which takes place the following morning at an autopsy in a nearby town, reveals Once Upon a Time in Anatolia‘s hidden moral center (the dialogue exchanges between the doctor and the prosecutor take on an increasing symbolic importance) and establishes this as one of the key movies of modern times. More here.

13. Norte, the End of History (Diaz, Philippines, 2013) – 9.7

Lav Diaz’s monumental Norte, the End of History, a 4-hour-plus transposition of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to the contemporary Philippines, is easily one of the most important films of the 21st century. Diaz, a profoundly modern filmmaker, reminds us why Dostoevsky’s 19th-century novel will always be sadly relevant — because pretentious and confused young men will always come up with half-baked philosophical theories to justify their supposed moral superiority. Diaz’s real masterstroke, however, is to essentially split Dostoevsky’s protagonist into three separate characters: Fabian (Sid Lucero) is the chief Raskolnikov figure, a law-school dropout who commits the horrific and senseless double murder of a loan shark and her daughter; Joaquin (Archie Alemania), a family man and laborer, is falsely accused of the crime and sentenced to a lengthy prison term; Eliza (Angeli Bayani), Joaquin’s wife, must consequently roam the countryside and look for odds jobs in order to provide for her and Joaquin’s young children. By having Dostoevsky’s themes of crime, punishment and redemption correspond to three characters instead of one, Diaz retains the Russian author’s trademark first-person psychological intensity while also offering a panoramic view of society that more closely resembles that of Count Tolstoy. Please don’t let the extensive running time scare you: like Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day, another favorite work of art that Norte resembles, not a minute of screen time here is wasted. More here.

12. Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, USA, 2012) – 9.8

Has it ever been less intellectually fashionable to love a movie that was so critically and commercially successful? Or, to put it another way, has there ever been a case where the vociferous objections of cultural commentators generated way more noise than anything film critics had to say in shaping how the dialogue about a movie played out in the public arena? I saw this astonishing film, director Kathryn Bigelow’s best, three times in the theater, then several more times on Blu-ray, and felt shaken to the core after every viewing. It depresses the hell out of me that I know some smart cinephiles, even some who liked The Hurt Locker, who nonetheless stayed away from this dark and brooding meditation on the cost of our “invisible war” out of fear that it would be an example of spiking-the-football propaganda (to borrow a phrase from President Obama). Remember, folks: torture isn’t morally wrong depending on whether it does or does not get results for those who practice it. It’s morally wrong, period (as Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal do actually show). Jessica Chastain, who puts a human face on — and provides an emotional center for — the very public and global story of the decade-long manhunt around which these debates swirled, gives a performance that is nothing less than phenomenal. The final, ambiguous close-up of her face, tears streaming down her cheeks, haunts me to this day. Full review here. More thoughts here and here.

11. Stranger By the Lake (Guiraudie, France, 2013) – 9.8

Alain Guiraudie’s film begins on a beautiful sunny day in an idyllic lakeside park populated by frolicsome gay men, and ends a little over an hour-and-a-half later on a note of existential terror as a single character stands alone in the nearby woods engulfed in pitch-black darkness. In between, sex and death are inextricably intertwined as one of the “cruisers” commits murder while another witnesses the act but doesn’t report it, mainly because of his sexual attraction to the killer. Adventurous viewers will find many dividends to be paid from the way the rigorous construction of the Hitchcockian-thriller elements meets a fascinating, near-ethnographic view of a very specific queer subculture, but I also can’t help but see it as a sly cautionary tale: who hasn’t been guilty at one time or another of rationalizing the obvious, potentially dangerous faults of a person to whom one is physically attracted? While much ink has been spilled about the movie’s Hitchcock connection and the explicitness of the sex scenes, there hasn’t been enough discussion about just how funny this is. My favorite example of Guiraudie’s humor is the pesky police inspector-character, who could’ve almost stepped out of one of Claude Chabrol’s daffier efforts, repeatedly popping up at the most inopportune moments. More here.

10. Mysteries of Lisbon (Ruiz, Portugal, 2010) – 9.8

The great Chilean director Raul Ruiz passed away in 2011 at the age of 70 and, shortly thereafter, his final masterwork turned up in U.S. theaters. This four-and-a-half hour distillation of a six hour made-for-television miniseries is the most fitting swan song one could imagine: an adaptation of a 19th century novel about a fourteen-year-old orphan whose investigation into his origins opens up a Pandora’s box of stories (and stories-within-stories) that make it feel like Ruiz’s magnum opus. The theme of the film is creation, whether it’s the construction of narratives or of self-created identities (my favorite narrative threads concern the intertwined destinies of an assassin who transforms himself into a nobleman and a gypsy who becomes a priest), which is perfectly captured by a restless camera that is constantly tracking around the characters in semi-circular fashion. This movie has a little bit of everything in it — Orson Welles, Charles Dickens, Carl Dreyer, Jorge Luis Borges and Luchino Visconti — while also remaining uniquely and supremely Ruizian.

9. The Social Network (Fincher, USA, 2010) – 9.8

Another groundbreaking, digitally-shot time capsule from David Fincher’s astonishing post-Panic Room mature period. Every aspect of this movie works — from the terrific rapid-fire dialogue of Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay (which recalls the heyday of Hollywood screwball comedy) to the sterling ensemble cast (notably Jesse Eisenberg as motor-mouthed Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Timberlake as the Mephistophelean Sean Parker, and Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, the man they both screw over and the movie’s true emotional core). But it is Fincher’s mise-en-scene, which for many reasons could have only been achieved in the 21st century, that turns The Social Network into an exhilarating roller-coaster ride. To what extent does this film about the origins of Facebook define our time? Who cares? It’s a film for all time. Full review here.

8. Life Without Principle (To, Hong Kong, 2011) – 9.9

Johnnie To’s 2011 masterpiece, one of the very best movies in his long and prolific filmography, depicts three interlocking crime stories about money-mad characters (the most prominent of whom is a lovable, low-level triad portrayed by the brilliant Lau Ching-Wan) scrambling to get ahead in the current global financial crisis. Short on action but long on delightful cat-and-mouse style maneuverings, this absurdist dramedy succeeds as both nimble, expertly clever storytelling (a set piece involving a young banker selling a high-risk investment to an elderly customer is worthy of Beckett) and as a prescient sociological analysis. In an ideal world, anyone wanting to make a crime thriller in Hollywood would be forced to watch this. Full review here.

7. Li’l Quinquin (Dumont, France, 2014) – 9.9

Bruno Dumont’s dark comedy/mystery miniseries begins with the unforgettable, borderline-surreal image of a dead cow being airlifted out of a WWII bunker by helicopter in a small town in northern France. Local police soon discover that the corpse of a woman has been stuffed inside of the cow and begin a criminal investigation. Ingeniously, Dumont shows these events not primarily from the perspective of the cops but rather through the eyes of the town’s children, specifically the titular character (Alane Delhaye), an altar boy who has a potty mouth, the face of a pugilist and a penchant for firecrackers. “Li’l Quiquin,” son of a local farmer, has a girlfriend, the symbolically named Eve (Lucy Caron), and by allowing the plot to unfold mainly from the semi-comprehending vantage point of these semi-innocent characters, Dumont essentially splits the duality inherent in the childlike cop-protagonist of his earlier Humanite into two separate realms: that of the town’s adults and that of the town’s children. The tension Dumont creates between these worlds handsomely pays off about half-way through the series when themes of racial and religious intolerance are introduced: one way Dumont bends the television format to his advantage is by using his expansive running time to show how prejudice is the result of social conditioning that can pervade an entire community (and the fact that one scene takes place during a Bastille Day celebration indicates that Dumont means for his location to function as a microcosm of France as a whole). If we are living in a “golden age” of television, as countless cultural critics believe, Li’l Quinquin is proof positive that this golden age is not restricted to America alone. Full review here.

6. The Strange Case of Angelica(De Oliveira, Portugal, 2010) – 9.9

The Strange Case of Angelica sees Manoel de Oliveira returning to the same theme as his previous film, the superb Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl, but where the earlier movie was one of his lightest and most purely entertaining, Angelica tackles “the unattainability of the ideal” in the slow, deliberate and weighty style we’ve come to expect from the master. This 2011 drama is adapted from a script that Oliveira originally wrote in the 1950s about Isaac, a young photographer haunted by the image of the title character, a deceased woman he is asked to photograph on behalf of her wealthy parents. Pretty soon he is, in the words of John Keats, “half in love with easeful death.” (It doesn’t help Isaac any that when he first spies Angelica through his camera, she opens her eyes and appears to come to life, thus making this story a parable about cinema as well.) This is full of the director’s usual digressions on science, art and history but it also features a new twist in a number of charming fantasy sequences involving CGI that, appropriately for someone who began working in the silent era, recall nothing so much as the primitive “illusionism” of Georges Melies. A beautiful, complex, deeply spiritual and essential film. More here.

5. A Touch of Sin (Jia, China, 2013) – 9.9

Mainland China’s greatest contemporary filmmaker, Jia Zhang-ke, made what is arguably his most vital film to date with this angry, occasionally shocking work of social criticism, in which four loosely connected stories are used to show how the collaboration between the Chinese Communist government and big business is wreaking havoc on the lives of ordinary Chinese citizens. Each story culminates in an act of tragic violence (all of which were apparently based on real events) while also paying deft homage to the “honor killings” that permeate the wuxia classics of yesteryear (beginning with King Hu’s A Touch of Zen, from which Jia’s movie derives its punning English-language title). Shot by Jia’s longtime cinematographer, the great Yu Lik-Wai, these stories unfold in long shot/long take tableaux that dazzle with their cinematic sophistication while also reinforcing the notion of tragic inevitability suggested by the circular narrative structure. Out of all the films I saw in 2013, this is the one that I suspect will be of the most interest in a few decades time when future cinephiles want to know what the year was like. Full review here.

4. Holy Motors (Carax, France, 2012) – 10

Leos Carax’s first feature film after a 13-year absence was this funny, strange, joyous, heartbreaking, beautiful and difficult to describe experience — an exhilarating, hallucinatory journey concerning a man named Oscar (the great, ridiculously expressive Denis Lavant) who finds himself, for reasons never explained, embodying eleven different avatars over the course of one long day. Whisking him from one “appointment” to the next is an elderly female chauffeur named Celine (an enchanting Edith Scob), and their warm-hearted bond perfectly balances out the moodier aspects of Carax’s eulogy for what he sees as the end of our era of “large visible machines.” Out of all the great movies I’ve seen in the 2010s, none has struck me as more deeply personal (nor more embarrassingly private — it was dedicated to Carax’s girlfriend, the actress Katarine Golubeva, who committed suicide shortly before production began, an event that is symbolically recreated in the film). Although Carax may not care about aggressively courting critics or even audiences, he still believes, like a child, that movies are magic. I defy you to watch this film and not believe it too. Full review here.

3. Boyhood (Linklater, USA, 2014) – 10

Richard Linklater delivered his magnum opus with this 12-years-in-the-making intimate epic about one Texas boy’s life from the ages of six to 18. No mere gimmick, Linklater’s strategy of shooting an average of just 3-to-4 days per year has resulted in a profound meditation on the concept of time, as viewers are asked to observe not only the protagonist (Ellar Coltrane) grow and change over the years but also the actors playing his sister (Lorelei Linklater) and parents (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette) — and are consequently invited to think about the passage of time in their own lives in the process. Linklater’s masterstroke was his decision to de-dramatize the material; many younger filmmakers could learn a thing or two from this film’s lack of external, dramatic action. In place of “plot,” he serves up a series of low-key but universally relatable scenes that movingly capture the essence of what it means to “grow up” in 2 hours and 46 minutes. Or, as Ethan Hawke put it in an interview, “What (Linklater)’s saying is that life doesn’t have to be hyperbolized. What we actually experience is good enough.” As always with this Linklater, there’s a great deal of humor and heart, but the film’s ingenious central conceit pushes Boyhood into the realm of a game-changer. Full review here.

2. Certified Copy (Kiarostami, Iran/France/Italy, 2010) – 10

Who could have guessed that austere Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami would end up doing his best work by shooting a warm, gentle and wise comedy in Italy with French superstar Juliette Binoche? An English writer (opera singer William Shimell) and a French antique store owner (Binoche) meet at a lecture given by the former on the topic of his new book — the qualitative difference between original works of art and their reproductions; she invites him on a tour of a nearby Tuscan village, during which time they converse about life, love and art. Midway through the film, they begin to play-act that they are a married couple for the benefit of a café owner who is under that mistaken impression. Only the longer the “couple” carries on the act, the more it seems as if they really are married and perhaps they were merely play-acting to be strangers in the beginning. I still don’t know how “original” this brilliant cinematic sleight-of-hand is or how much it intentionally “reproduces” Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Luis Bunuel in general (acknowledged most obviously by the presence of Bunuel’s longtime screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere). But I do know this film is a genuine masterpiece, one that has already proven to be endlessly rewatchable. More here.

1. Goodbye to Language (Godard, France, 2014) – 10

In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1996 film For Ever Mozart, the director poses the question, “In the ‘I think, therefore I am,’ is the ‘I’ of ‘I am’ no longer the same as the ‘I’ of ‘I think’ and why?” Goodbye to Language seeks to answer this Cartesian inquiry with a resounding “no” by offering a philosophical meditation on the fractured nature of identity in our era of mass communication. In his astonishing first feature in 3-D, the now-84-year-old Godard pointedly shows, through an almost impossibly rich tapestry of stereoscopic images and sounds, how language and technology have conspired to create barriers that separate humans not only from each other but also from themselves (“Soon everyone will need an interpreter to understand the words coming from their own mouths,” is one characteristically epigrammatic line of dialogue.) The film is split into three parts: “Nature” (a section demarcated by a title card reading “1”), which focuses on Josette and Gedeon (Héloïse Godet and Kamel Abdelli); “Metaphor” (a section demarcated by a title card reading “2”), which focuses on Ivitch and Marcus (Zoé Bruneau and Richard Chevallier); and a short third part (beginning with a title card reading “3D”), which introduces a third couple–Godard and his longtime collaborator Anne-Marie Mieville, who are not seen but whose voices are heard on the soundtrack. The real “star” of Goodbye to Language, however, is not a human at all but rather Godard’s mixed-breed dog Roxy, who is frequently depicted alone, frolicking in nature, commanding both the most screen time and serving as the subject of some of the film’s most dazzling stereoscopic effects. The shots of Roxy’s handsome snout in the maw of Godard and cinematographer Fabrice Aragno’s homemade 3-D-camera rig, which convey an overwhelming feeling of love for the animal on the part of his owner/director, are so rapturously beautiful they may make you want to cry. The film ends by juxtaposing the sounds of a dog barking with that of a baby wailing on the soundtrack, thus linking Roxy not only to nature but, implicitly, to a state of unspoiled innocence that humans possess only prior to learning to speak. Godard’s poetic use of 3-D in Goodbye to Language, the best such use of the technology in any movie I’ve seen, puts this groundbreaking work in the class of his (and the cinema’s) great achievements. Full review here.

In the past six years that I’ve taught film studies at the college level, I’ve been lucky to count some renowned scholars and authors among my colleagues. One of my fellow professors at Oakton Community College, Laurence Knapp, is the author of, among other books, the groundbreaking study Directed by Clint Eastwood (McFarland & Company), and the editor of the brand new David Fincher: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi), an essential read for Fincher fans. I recently sat down with Larry for a wide-ranging talk about his new book, particularly as it relates to Fincher’s evolution as a filmmaker, the “auteur theory,” and his expectations for the much hyped Gone Girl, which opens in wide release today.

MGS: How does one go about editing a book of interviews?

LK: My approach to a book of interviews is much like a documentary film. The essence of documentary is to find the right archival material that fits and that forms a narrative. So when I’m looking for interviews, I’m looking for interviews that dovetail together and form a narrative line that allows you to observe the filmmaker in his or her various stages of development. But, at the same time, you become conscious of certain themes or details that either the reporter brings up or that the director keeps mentioning. Most of the time it’s reporters. I read an interview for Gone Girl that was published in Playboy. And, most of the interview, the questions involved his upbringing, California . . .

MGS: George Lucas living down the street . . .

LK: George Lucas, starting out with Korty Films, and doing all these other things, and then Propaganda Films. So a good portion of the interview repeated all that same material that is in the book. But what’s interesting, when you read the earlier interviews, Fincher, the person — and just the sort of idiosyncratic childhood he had — that’s not the focus. It’s more like this idea of Fincher as the Phantom of the Opera or something. (Chuckles) Like this weird, dark figure who somehow or another made Alien 3 and Se7en and The Game. And it’s not until Fight Club that I feel like Fincher is starting to express himself more and share some of his ideas and views of the world and how he approaches filmmaking . . .

MGS: With Fight Club, you think?

LK: With Fight Club, yeah, I feel like he’s more willing to own it and to promote it because he’s very skittish being interviewed. Again I was reading these Gone Girl interviews and he seems so much more comfortable joking, and also he shares even more personal details that even I was unaware of in some of these recent interviews. It’s peculiar how this works with a filmmaker and his or her interaction with the media. It’s actually much more dynamic than you think. And you can actually create a documentary-like chronology that tells a story that merits the form of a book.

MGS: I was impressed by how diverse the interviews were. I felt like each interview brought out another side of him in a way. Was that something you were trying to do? For instance, there was one interview around the time of Panic Room where the guy who’s interviewing him is very laudatory of the film and then Fincher seems to turn around and really criticize it. He’s very self-deprecating and I feel like he’s almost doing that because the guy is praising him.

LK: The one from the Independent. You know, that’s the other thing that’s interesting about the book: I noticed that a lot of the British press understands and appreciates Fincher long before the American press. Lately, I’ve noticed journals like Empire and some other British periodicals to be a better source of material than the American publications. You still have Film Comment but . . .

MGS: Which he’s on the cover of right now.

LK: And I read the latest Film Comment interview with Amy Taubin, who’s in the book . . .

MGS: With the Fight Club interview from the Village Voice . . .

LK: And she’s a wonderful writer, and a critic as well. But I mean, is there really a go-to, somewhat-sophisticated film magazine that enables a journalist to conduct a lengthy and informative interview?

MGS: No, I think Film Comment is it for the United States. Sight & Sound I think is still good and he’s actually on the cover of that right now too.

LK: Yeah, I mean, I did intentionally pick things that work together and that I think emphasize different parts of Fincher. And again, people think, “Oh, all you did was collect a bunch of interviews.” But it actually is sometimes harder to try and figure out how to arrange that in a way that makes sense as a book than to just write my own critical piece about something.

MGS: I think he comes across in the book as a complex and fully rounded person. The interview for the Guardian was the one that I think the British Film Institute hosted where he’s in front of an audience and he’s cracking jokes throughout the whole thing. And I thought, “This is so different from every other interview,” because he’s got an audience and he’s trying to entertain them. As a teacher, I recognized that right away. That’s what you do when you have a crowd: you try and charm them.

LK: Absolutely.

MGS: You make them laugh so you know that they’re paying attention, which you don’t have to do in a one-on-one interview. That one interview kind of stuck out for me from all the others because he seemed so much more charming.

LK: Let me privilege your view of Fincher: I think that Zodiac allowed him to get out of his shell somehow. That was a pivotal film for him.

MGS:Zodiac was for me what Fight Club was for you. I saw Se7en when it first came out and I really liked it. Then I saw Fight Club and I liked it but I thought there was something a little dubious about it as a social critique. I liked it cinematically but I thought, you know, making fun of people for shopping at IKEA . . . I thought it worked cinematically and thought it worked as a homoerotic dark comedy about guys beating each other up. I liked it but I didn’t think it was a serious film. And then I missed Panic Room but when I saw Zodiac, I said, “Oh my God, this guy’s a genius.” So I thought he made a quantum leap with that film. And then I liked Benjamin Button a lot. I thought it was almost underrated. And then TheSocial Network is my second favorite. I think that’s a masterpiece as well.

LK: That’s my second favorite as well. But with Zodiac, I feel it’s his art film without him fully recognizing that, you know? ‘Cause I swear the film is really about just . . . time.

MGS: Time is the subject. Time and obsession.

LK: Time is what defines the obsession.

MGS: Exactly. It’s about the impact of time on obsession.

LK: And I love the ending. I love (Robert Graysmith) walking in there and he’s expecting this epiphany with — who’s the guy working in the hardware store?

MGS: Arthur Leigh Allen.

LK: Arhtur Leigh Allen. And there’s nothing. There’s no shared eyeline that causes him shivers. It’s just this empty experience that doesn’t give him any sense of . . .

MGS: Any closure.

LK:Anything.

MGS: The first time I saw Zodiac, I didn’t recognize its greatness. My wife showed it to me. I thought, “It’s pretty good,” but the ending of it bothered me. I mistakenly thought Fincher’s point-of-view was Graysmith’s point-of-view. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it and about six months later I watched it again and I took away the opposite message. I thought, “Oh my God, there’s so much critical distance between Fincher and the lead character.” At the end, that scene in the hardware store hit me like a ton of bricks. Arthur Leigh Allen asks Graysmith, “Can I help you with anything?,” and Graysmith says, “No.” And it’s such a profound moment because Allen is speaking as a hardware-store clerk but when Graysmith replies, “No,” it’s as if he’s saying, “There’s nothing you can say or do that’s gonna help me in any way, that’s gonna bring me any peace.” So I think the film is really critical of its protagonist in a way that is fascinating. ‘Cause it’s really about the three guys who are obsessed with the case. And, of the three, I think Mark Ruffalo’s character has the healthiest attitude: he’s able to separate his work life and his personal life. And, of course, Robert Downey, Jr.’s character goes off the deep end. (Chuckles) It destroys him.

LK: Yeah, I think the film is being critical and somewhat dispassionate towards the three protagonists. And I think it’s very clever to have the bookend with the victim at the end, and the idea that the only thing that persists is the trauma. It’s never resolved.

MGS: Which is kind of a recurring theme in Fincher’s work.

LK: Always.

MGS: “Films that scar.”

LK: Films that scar! And bleed.

MGS: Which, by the way, it was nice to finally read that interview from 1996, Mark Salisbury’s “Seventh Hell.”

LK: You know, that piece is so important in Fincher scholarship. It really is the first major profile of Fincher that gives us insight into that stereotype of him as the “dark” film director. And “films that scar” gets quoted all the time. It’s like that has to be there. And Mark is a very nice fellow, very easy to work with. But, yeah, I think that film is also critical of narrative in general, how genre is expected to function (what is Zodiac — serial killer film? biopic? newspaper film? cop film?), and also American history. And, as I mention in the introduction in that book, I feel that it is one of the most Gen X of films. How we all feel about what’s happened to this country since we came of age in the late 70s. We’ve always had this weird feeling that there’s no ending and there’s no real coherent chain of events or point to anything. And, by the way, that theme is repeated in Benjamin Button.

MGS: Exactly. And that’s his other film where time is really the subject.

LK: A little bit more explicitly with the prologue. But it works, it’s fine. But if you think about Zodiac, I think I mention in the introduction that it’s L’avventura meets Silence of the Lambs. That it just feels like a meditation. And I feel like he’s recreating the feeling that some of us had who were born in the 60s of how things once existed. And I don’t think he’s really done that with any other film.

MGS: No, he hasn’t. And I think that’s because it’s his own childhood — not only the time but the place. Ultimately, Zodiac is about identity because the act of trying to solve these unsolved murders is how Graysmith has chosen to try and make sense of the past and his own life and to try and give them meaning. The more time goes by, the more obsessed he becomes.

LK: It is a generational statement about the late 60s. But I love the fact that you adore the film even though you were born in the mid 70s. When I watch Zodiac, it has that feeling I had when I was 10 or 11. The (Baby) Boomers always sort of present the 60s as the golden age when everything made sense but what Fincher’s saying is the opposite. It’s like with the Manson killings and Zodiac — that’s when things started to get weird.

MGS: The dark side of the counterculture, the randomness and the meaninglessness of it.

LK: And the serial killer does not become a cultural icon until that period. Suddenly the serial killer is not some nameless, faceless thing but part of our world, a pop figure of horror and dread that cannot be easily identified or apprehended. Zodiac ushers in such figures as the Son of Sam.

MGS: That’s what’s so unsettling about the film. All of the murders occur in the first 26 minutes and yet the film goes on for another two hours and 20 minutes!

LK: And it’s also authentic because they never figured out who did it.

MGS: Exactly. So, on the other hand, it has to end that way.

LK: He’s offering us a different view of how American civilization has functioned. That maybe we are — these last 30 or 40 years — in the beginning of the Great Decline, and this is what signaled it. And that’s why (Fincher) can’t let it go. He always goes on about his dad being oblivious of Zodiac’s threats — “You mean, you want me to ride the bus while there’s some crazed killer threatening to kidnap a school bus and kill all the kids?” But think about that, what kind of effect that has on somebody. It’s like, “Well, then there’s no one who can protect me or restore order.” I’m always glad when a film like that doesn’t find its audience. It really signifies how daring and creative it is, that he really is not concerned that he is leading the audience down a blind alley.

MGS: It didn’t find its audience right away.

LK: It never really did.

MGS: It seems like there’s a cult developing around it.

LK: Very few of my students mention it. If I bring it up, they don’t know it that well. But when you compare it to a film like Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I just feel like, with that film, Fincher is playing it safe with a franchise. He’s just protecting his interests. And you can tell the difference.

MGS: I agree wholeheartedly. I had the opposite reaction to Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that I had to Zodiac. The first time I saw it, I really enjoyed it. I watched it a second time and I thought it was kind of tedious. It was like I got nothing out of watching it again.

LK: What else ya got, man?

MGS: So, what exactly do you think makes a David Fincher film a “David Fincher film?” I think he’s an unlikely candidate for a book in this Conversations with Filmmakers series in a lot of ways. He doesn’t fit the popular notion of an auteur. Unlike the other American directors who came up in the early-to-mid-90s, he doesn’t write his own scripts or put himself in his films, and he even says he hates giving interviews. Directors like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith use their personas to market their films in a way that is more like what Hitchcock did.

LK: Well, they are celebrity auteurs and enjoy the attention. In fact, I think Kevin Smith enjoys speaking to film nerds or comic-book freaks at Comic-Con more than he does making films — although I just watched Cop Out and kind of liked it. The difference? Why Fincher stands out for me? Very simple: form equals content. Of all of them, no one understands film like David Fincher. David Fincher is your old-line, camera-as-pen auteur. He speaks through the plastic medium. Fincher uses mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound better than any of them. He is concerned with that more than he is with building a cult of celebrity or a cool profile with fans or the press. You get the sense that that’s what he is wholly concerned with: film as an aesthetic object. And also as a social one. He has a knack for picking material that resonates with his generation or with the audience at any given time.

MGS: Which is probably most true of Fight Club and The Social Network. Those were zeitgeist films.

LK: Although Gone Girl looks like it might be a shrewd . . . we’re both kind of careful with this because we’re not sure what it is yet — but, judging from the book, as soon as I started reading it, I’m like, “Oh, I know why he picked this.” And I like the fact that everyone’s really bugged out because it’s written by a woman who has the nerve to say that women can be frightening and dangerous. I’m like, “Here we go. This might be the female Fight Club.”

MGS: Some people have said the book is misogynist, which is ironic because I don’t think anyone would say that if it had been written by a man.

LK: Well, we are now — and Fincher is hip to this, this is the Gen-X thing — we are the first generation in which men and women are fairly equal. So there’s a lot more anxiety about what the roles are and how you’re supposed to conduct yourself. And I felt that really is what made that book compelling and that’s what attracted him to the book — the whole guise of the “cool girl” as a way of merely satisfying what she presumes the man wants her to be. And, for Gen X, I think we’ve navigated these very rapid changes in how couples function and how they communicate. And so it’s almost like this is more of a Gen Y thing than Gen X, because they have so much trouble with dating and having meaningful relationships. And knowing exactly who they are because they’re so broadcast, through social media, this whole idea of who they are, constant representation and re-representation on their terms. And it’s kind of an extension of that in the book with the whole Amazing Amy series and how she’s presented and how she has this sort of mediated view of herself. It’s part of her pathology. So even there I’m thinking, this is pretty timely and, again, this is Gen X. Boomers would not come up with this. They’re all about female liberation and equality — Women’s Lib and the feminists. But this is what happens when you pretty much have parity. All of a sudden, you look at each other and go, “What the hell? What’s next?” I think this could be extremely timely. Or it could piss the shit out of some people too. Because this is a dirty secret, this is the sacred cow, that women are just as despicable as men.

MGS: Of course.

LK: And one of the most sexist things is to assume that women are innately more refined or more settled or just more functional than men. That’s not true. They’re just as bad in a different way. And that’s what I feel like (Gillian Flynn) is bringing out. She has the guts to do it. Let’s face it: that main character, I mean, she makes the Kevin Spacey character in Se7en look like a pre-schooler. This is Fight Club for women. Because in Fight Club, the male psyche is all about frustrated desire and blunt-force trauma and self-destruction. A woman relies more on psychology and manipulation — not punches to the face and exploding office buildings. So I feel like this is very organic, it fits in with everything else Fincher has done and I’m actually looking forward to it regardless of how it turns out. This is a very savvy moment for Fincher. But again this, to me, as opposed to the Kevin Smiths and the Quentin Tarantinos, who spend more time trying to generate an adolescent fanbase, I feel like with Fincher, he is that old-school artist who’s like, “Here’s what I made. Here’s what I painted. Here’s what I staged and shot. Now you do the rest and interpret it.”

With the start of the Chicago International Film Festival only six weeks away, it’s time for my annual wish list of films I’d most like to see turn up there. This is a combination of movies that have generated buzz at other festivals throughout the year, movies by favorite directors whose production status I’ve been following in the press, recommendations from friends and even a title or two that may be nothing more than rumor. In alphabetical order:

Arirang (Kim, S. Korea)

South Korea’s Kim Ki-duk directed an astonishing 12 feature films between 2000 and 2008. The last of these, Breath, belatedly received its U.S. premiere at Facets Multimedia earlier this year and suggested that Kim’s wellspring of creativity had run dry, an impression seemingly verified by the 3 year silence that’s followed it. Arirang, Kim’s latest, is apparently a one man show/pseudo-documentary in which Kim himself examines this impasse a la 8 1/2. This premiered at Cannes where its supposed “navel gazing” quality drove many viewers up the wall. I say bring it on!

The Assassin (Hou, Taiwan)

When I put this on my wish list of films I hoped would turn up at CIFF last year it was nothing more than a pipe dream. Since then, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s long rumored martial arts film actually did quietly begin production. Tadanobu Asano and Takeshi Kaneshiro have apparently joined a formidable cast that has long had Hou regulars Shu Qi and Chang Chen attached.

Bernie (Linklater, USA)

Richard Linklater has intriguingly described this as his version of Fargo – a quirky true crime tale set in his beloved native Texas. Jack Black (reuniting with Linklater for the first time since the excellent School of Rock), Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey star.

Carnage (Polanski, France/Germany)

Roman Polanski follows up his estimable The Ghost Writer with an adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s Tony award winning play about a long night of drinking and fighting between two married couples brought together after a playground fight between their children. Polanski’s talent for shooting in confined spaces and the sterling cast (Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz, Kate Winslet and John C. Reilly) make this a mouth-watering prospect.

A Dangerous Method (Cronenberg, Germany/Canada)

David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s play about the birth of psychoanalysis, which is depicted as stemming from an imagined rivalry between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). As someone who thinks Cronenberg’s recent Mortensen collaborations (A History of Violence, Eastern Promises) are his very best work, my expectations for this could not be higher.

The Day He Arrives (Hong, S. Korea)

Another character-driven Hong Sang-soo comedy/drama that premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar where it was universally admired, begging the question of why it didn’t land in Official Competition. This one apparently deals with the relationship between a film professor and a film critic. Expect the usual witty merry-go-round of booze, sex and self-deceit.

The Devil’s Church (de Oliveira, Brazil/Portugal)

A year after working with CGI for the first time, the great Portugese director Manoel de Oliveira continues to stretch himself by travelling to Brazil to shoot his first film outside of Europe (and his 57th overall). The Devil’s Church is based on a Faustian-themed short story by Machado de Assis, widely considered Brazil’s greatest writer. Ricardo Trepa, Oliveira’s grandson and favorite leading man of late, stars. CIFF’s fondness for Oliveira makes this a good bet.

Faust (Sokurov, Germany/Russia)

Speaking of Faust . . . I’m on the fence about Russian miserabilist Aleksandr Sokurov whose films frequently astonish on a technical level but fail to stir the soul in the manner of his mentor Andrei Tarkovsky. But this Russian/German co-production looks promising – a new version of Faust with Fassbinder’s muse Hannah Schygulla in the Marguerite role.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Fincher, USA/Sweden)

English language remakes of recent foreign language films are almost always a bad idea but since the Hollywood version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is directed by David Fincher, we can assume it will be an exception. At the very least, Fincher, whose best work has featured dark, twisty narratives involving serial killings, expert use of CGI and Boolean logic that seemingly puts this project in his wheelhouse, can be counted on to push the material in an interesting direction.

Goodbye (Rasoulof, Iran)

According to reports out of Cannes Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof made this film under “semi-clandestine conditions” while awaiting sentencing following his highly publicized arrest and trial for “anti-regime propaganda” in 2010. Goodbye uses the story of the disbarment of a female lawyer to allegedly tackle the repression of Ahmadinejad’s Iran head-on.

The Grandmaster (Wong, Hong Kong)

This made my wish list last year and, knowing Wong Kar-Wai’s glacial pace of shooting and editing (and re-shooting and re-editing), it could also make the list again next year. A film about the early years of Ip Man, best known as Bruce Lee’s kung-fu teacher, “built around one of the most exciting sets and fighting sequences that I have ever seen” according to Fortissimo Films chairman Michael Werner who came on board as associate producer earlier this year.

Hara Kiri: Death of a Samurai (Miike, Japan)

Takashi Miike continues his recent trend of remaking chambara classics, this time in 3D, by taking a stab at Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri from 1962. But with Miike, you can always expect the unexpected, and this project boasts surprising collaborators like veteran art house producer Jeremy Thomas and A-list actor Koji Yakusho (the favorite leading man of Miike’s mentor Shohei Imamura and the star of Miike’s superb 13 Assassins).

Le Havre (Kaurismaki, Finland/France)

I’ve never really warmed to the deadpan humor of Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismaki whose “minimalist” films have always struck me as less than meets the eye. His latest, a supposedly sentimental tale of immigration politics centered on a French shoeshiner and an African refugee, was by far the most critically admired film at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Color me interested.

Hugo (Scorsese, USA/France)

Martin Scorsese throws his hat into the 3D ring with this Johnny Depp/Jude Law-starring children’s film about a little boy who lives inside the walls of a Paris metro station in the 1930s. This will obviously receive a super-wide release; if it does turn up at CIFF it will be as a sneak preview “Gala Presentation” (hopefully with cast and/or crew present).

In the Qing Dynasty (Jia, China)

Another improbable but intriguing-sounding concoction is the latest from Jia Zhangke, the important, formidably arty chronicler of China’s tumultuous recent history, who appears to be making his first big budget film with this historical epic. Produced by none other than Hong Kong gangster movie specialist Johnnie To.

J. Edgar (Eastwood, USA)

Clint Eastwood’s critical stock is at the lowest its been in some time following his poorly received (but in my humble opinion misunderstood) melodramas Invictus and Hereafter. Stakes are therefore even higher than they otherwise would be for this J. Edgar Hoover biopic scripted by Dustin Lance Black and starring Leonardo di Caprio and Armie Hammer. As with Hugo Cabret, this will only make it in as a Gala Presentation (not out of the question since this happened with Hereafter last year). Sure to make my CIFF wish list next year is the prolific Eastwood’s next film – a remake of A Star is Born starring . . . Beyonce?

Life Without Principle (To, Hong Kong)

This began life as a project titled Death of a Hostage when it started shooting (without a script) in 2008. Three years later, it’s finally complete and it sounds like Johnnie To’s most exciting in some time: a bank heist thriller starring the charismatic, enormously talented Lau Ching-Wan; the last collaboration between these two, 2007’s ingenious Mad Detective, was one of my favorite films of the last decade. Will Life Without Principle stack up? Is the title a reference to Thoreau? Is the above movie poster the coolest ever?

Night Fishing (Park/Park, S. Korea)

Park Chan-wook, the reigning innovator of the South Korean New Wave, caused a stir on the festival circuit earlier this year with this 30 minute horror short shot entirely on an iphone. This alone would justify the purchase of a ticket to one of CIFF’s notoriously erratic “Shorts Programs.”

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan, Turkey)

Still photographer Nuri Bilge Ceylan made one of the great directorial debuts of the last decade with Distant, a deliberately paced, minimalist comedy about the growing estrangement between a professional photographer in Istanbul and his visiting country bumpkin cousin. If Ceylan’s subsequent films haven’t quite lived up to the promise of his debut, this film about a night in the life of a doctor living in the harsh title region (the gateway between Europe and Asia) should still be worth a look. Won the Grand Prix at Cannes.

A Separation (Farhadi, Iran)

Asghar Farhadi (Fireworks Wednesday, About Elly) is a CIFF veteran so one can only hope that this universally admired marital drama, which won three prizes in Berlin (including the Golden Bear), will turn up here – preferably as an in competition entry with multiple screenings.

This is Not a Film (Panahi/Mirtahmasb, Iran)

Like Mohammad Rasoulof, Jafar Panahi essentially made his latest film as a political prisoner in Iran. Co-directed by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, this documentary-style “diary” about the great director’s inability to work was smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick buried inside of a cake. The more attention that’s brought to the tragic plight of Rasoulof and Panahi the better.

The Turin Horse (Tarr/Hranitzky, Hungary)

Hungary’s Bela Tarr took home the Best Director award in Berlin for this, his acclaimed final film. The premise is a fictionalized account of what happened to the horse Friedrich Nietzsche saw being whipped in Turin a month before the philosopher was diagnosed with the mental illness that left him bedridden for the rest of his life. Tarr himself has described this as his “most radical” work, a daunting claim from the uncompromising, austere maestro responsible for the seven and a half hour Satantango. I was fortunate to see Bela Tarr bring The Werckmeister Harmonies to CIFF in person in 2000. One can only hope he’ll see fit to do so again with this swan song.

Even though I voted against it in my Oscar pool, I kept secretly hoping all night that The Social Network might somehow win Best Picture, especially after Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross scored an upset win for their excellent original score. But as soon as Tom Hooper’s name was called for Best Director, the game was over and I realized why “the Facebook movie” never really had a chance – its main rival, The King’s Speech, was a middlebrow entertainment that plays like a virtual checklist of Oscar’s favorite qualities: true story, period piece (set against the beginning of the second World War no less), a cast of British acting royalty and a main character who overcomes a physical handicap (especially since Colin Firth didn’t, as my friend David Hanley points out, go “full retard”).

Lovers of The Social Network can take solace knowing that the list of movies that have never won Best Picture Academy Awards is more illustrious than the list of those that have. Like many great American films before it, David Fincher’s zeitgeist movie was too edgy, too hip, too relevant. Or as Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker might say: “Winning Best Picture isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Losing Best Picture.” Fans of David Fincher who don’t agree shouldn’t worry though. The man will win an Oscar someday, probably fifteen years from now for a film that isn’t as brilliant or innovative as Zodiac or The Social Network.

P.S. – A big thank you to Judi Marcin for throwing the best Oscar party ever. You deserve a little gold statue.

Like this:

It may not have been as strong of a calendar year as 2007, which I’m convinced will go down as one of the all-time great movie years alongside of 1939 and 1960 (but that’s a subject for another post); 2010 was still a good year for the movies. I would go so far as to say it offered an embarrassment of riches for Chicago-area cinephiles – provided, that is, one knew where to look. The only films I really wanted to see but missed were Tuesday, After Christmas, the latest buzzed about film of the Romanian New Wave, which received a scant few Chicago International Film Festival screenings, and the full five and a half hour cut of Olivier Assayas’ Carlos, which turned up for a few Music Box screenings before being supplanted by the much shorter, and ostensibly more audience friendly, theatrical cut. But with so much good cinema fare playing only in limited runs or at “alternative” venues, a few things are bound to slip through the cracks. Having said all that, I’d like to give a special shout out to The Chicago International Film Festival for having a more impressive line-up than usual and the enterprising programmers at the Music Box, the Siskel Center and Facets, who continued to go above and beyond the call of duty in bringing the best of contemporary world cinema to the Second City.

Below is a list of my ten favorite new films to first play Chicago in 2010 (even though some debuted elsewhere last year), as well as fifteen runners-up.

The peerless Isabelle Huppert combines sinewy physical strength with psychological complexity as Maria, the French owner of a coffee plantation in a nameless civil war-torn African country. As violence escalates, Maria presses on running her business, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that the world around her is descending into chaos. No characters are spared the harsh eye of director Claire Denis in this disturbing drama – not Maria’s fractured family, the government troops, nor the rebel soldiers (including a fair number of child soldiers) led by Isaach de Bankole. This isn’t a masterpiece on the order of her earlier Beau Travail but no one else except Denis, who spent her childhood in Africa and has now made three films there, seems willing to perform the necessary task of providing a moral reckoning of France’s colonial past.

Jacques Rivette’s supposed swan song, which some allege was completed by his longtime screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer, is a charming, wise, deceptively simple film that clocks in at a very atypically brief 84 minutes. The story concerns an Italian businessman (Sergio Castellitto) who becomes involved with a low-rent traveling circus, presided over by a mysterious Englishwoman (Jane Birkin). But plot is really only an excuse for Rivette and Bonitzer to explore the nature of performance and how art and life are inextricably bound. Delightful scenes of jugglers, acrobats and clowns performing are intercut with the main story until it becomes unclear where the performance ends and life begins. If it is Rivette’s last movie, it is a fitting farewell indeed. Full review here.

8. Carlos (Assayas, France/Germany) Music Box. Rating: 8.4

French writer/director Olivier Assayas posits the international terrorist as rock star in this electrifying biopic of Ilich “Carlos the Jackal” Ramirez Sanchez. Multilingual, made-for-television and shot in many different countries, this insanely ambitious epic is a perfect reflection of the “global” character of cinema in the 21st century – even as it sticks closely to the “rise and fall” formula of a Warner Brothers gangster film of the 1930s. The highlight is an hour long scene depicting Sanchez’s takeover of OPEC headquarters in 1975, a set piece that puts most contemporary Hollywood action movies to shame. If the film’s inevitable downward spiral denouement can’t sustain as much interest, no matter. This is still essential stuff.

Everyone Else announces the arrival of a major new directorial talent in Maren Ade, the film’s young female writer/director. In only her second feature film, the chronicle of the end of a love affair between a young German couple vacationing in Sardinia, Ade shows she knows a thing or two about human nature and the mysterious machinations of a relationship in irreversible decline. Reportedly inspired by Ingmar Bergman, whose relationship dramas traverse similar psychological terrain, I found this more devastating and more cinematic than Ade’s ostensible models. I can’t wait to see what she does next. Full review here.

“Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me.” So begins the latest film by Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul, one of the world’s most exciting young directors. Fully deserving of its Cannes Palm d’Or, Uncle Boonmee is a masterful tone poem that expands on the spiritual themes of Joe’s earlier work to encompass a graceful, feature-length meditation on dying and death. Shot entirely in the jungles of rural Thailand, the cinematography is appropriately lush and the dense sound mix creates an impressively immersive experience. I suspect the experimental aspects of this film may drive some viewers up the wall but I could have watched it go on forever; I emerged from the theater as relaxed and refreshed as I typically feel after watching a film by Yasujiro Ozu. More here.

5. Wild Grass (Resnais, France) – The Music Box. Rating: 9.3

Alain Resnais’ alternately sublime and ridiculous study of fantasy and obsession represents a return to the “wildness” of his early films and, for my money, is also his best film in decades. I really admire the way Resnais takes the premise of a generic romantic comedy (a typical meet-cute involving his regular players André Dussollier and Sabine Azema) and continually undercuts the audience’s desire to “identify” with these characters. Is Dussollier a stalker? Did he actually kill a man in the past? Why does Azema express interest in him as soon as he loses interest in her? The most obvious example of the film’s surrealist/satirical bent is its first false ending, complete with Sweeping Romantic Gesture and Twentieth Century Fox theme music. This is followed by the “real” ending, a cosmic punchline so bat-shit crazy that it nearly caused me to fall out of my chair from laughing so hard. I also loved the candy box colors and near-constant use of crane shots. Now what the hell’s wrong with Sony Pictures Classics that they won’t release a blu-ray, hmmmm?

4. Shutter Island(Scorsese, USA) – Wide Release. Rating: 9.5

The closest Martin Scorsese has come to making a straight horror film is also the best thing he’s done since Goodfellas in 1990. Forget about the narrative twists and turns, which aren’t any more implausible or predictable than what you’ll find in Hitchcock’s best movies. Shutter Island is a great film because of the raw, ferocious emotions at its core, in particular the palpable guilt, fear and paranoia of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels. These emotions all coalesce in the film’s ingenious finale, which critic Glenn Kenny has aptly compared to Vertigo and referred to as a “perfect note of empathetic despair.” Once the mystery plot has given up its surface secrets, Shutter Island still repays multiple viewings as a brilliant character study. And the unusually baroque visuals, which clearly show the influence of Scorsese’s idol Michael Powell, are never less than a treat.

With this, his 19th feature film, Roman Polanski earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first director to supervise post-production of a major motion picture from jail. Unfortunately, the brouhaha surrounding l’affaire Polanski overshadowed this superb return to form, a meticulously crafted political thriller. Comparisons between The Ghost Writer and Shutter Island are instructive, as both are influenced by Alfred Hitchcock but in radically different ways; Martin Scorsese is the modernist, Polanski the classicist. In Scorsese’s film, every aspect of the movie is aggressively stylized as a way for the director to comment on the subject matter (expressive camera movements, bold color schemes, intentionally fake-looking digital backdrops, crazy editing rhythms). In Polanski’s film, the visual components are just as aesthetically developed but are less self-conscious and more pressed to the service of, not really the story per se, but more what I would call Polanski’s theme; this is most obvious in Polanski’s rigorous color scheme (in particular the suppression of red) and the set design of Pierce Brosnan’s beach-front home, which is perhaps best described as a modern-art nightmare. Both movies finally aren’t about “story” at all; Shutter Island centers on the question of whether violence is inherent in human nature. The Ghost Writer is a query into the dark heart of our new global society and how the major players on that stage use, betray, victimize and discard one another.

2. The Social Network (Fincher, USA) – Wide Release. Rating: 9.8

Another groundbreaking, digitally shot time capsule from David Fincher’s astonishing post-Panic Room mature period. Every aspect of this movie works — from the terrific rapid-fire dialogue of Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay (which recalls the heyday of Hollywood screwball comedy) to the sterling ensemble cast (notably Jesse Eisenberg as motor-mouthed Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Timberlake as the Mephistophelean Sean Parker, and Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, the man they both screw over and the movie’s true emotional core). But it’s Fincher’s mise-en-scene, which for many reasons could have only been achieved in the 21st century, that turns The Social Network into an exhilarating roller coaster ride. A film that defines our time? Who cares? It’s a film for all time. Full review here.

I’ve heard Abbas Kiarostami’s latest masterpiece described as both a comedy and a metaphysical horror film. Certified Copy, which seems to be both a curve ball and a true-to-form puzzle film from the master, is great enough and slippery enough to accommodate both descriptions simultaneously. I still don’t know if this is a story about the characters played by Juliette Binoche and William Shimmel engaging in some extreme form of play-acting or if the film instead posits a kind of mutable reality in which their identities are constantly morphing in accordance with the demands of a mischievous narrative. And that’s how I like it. Binoche continues to look more radiant with each passing year and Shimell (a professional opera singer but amateur thespian) is pitch-perfect as her foil. More here.